The Liars' Club: A Memoir
by Mary Karr
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Book Summary Information
Author: Mary KarrEdition: Paperback
Published: 2005-05-31
ISBN: 0143035746
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Book Reviews of The Liars' Club: A Memoir
Book Review: Wow!!
Summary: 5 Stars
Mary Karr is that most exceptional of non-fiction writers: one who went through exceptional tragic / comic circumstantial experiences as a child; who absolutely remembers them AND how she felt as if they were yesterday; and who grew up to become a literature professor who can write!! Wow! That's the only word for the book. I have never read an autobiography remotely like it.
In simple terms, Mary, the younger of two sisters, was the daughter of a tough, take-no-prisoners, blue collar oil refinery worker Father and an ethereal, arts and drame culture-oriented Mother with her heart still in New York or Paris but with obligations in backwater southeast Texas. What a situation, and, to my amazement ... she remembers it all, seemingly day-by-day.
The Liar's Club (her small child's view of hew dad and his friends and their times in the bar) is a memoir from her earlest years through late childhood (her later book Cherry carries the story forward through teenage years). You'll both laugh histerically and cry at the heartbreaking situations for the little girl and the family trying to keep it all together. Wow! Highly recommended!
Summary of The Liars' Club: A Memoir
In this funny, razor-edged memoir, Mary Karr, a prize-winning poet and critic, looks back at her upbringing in a swampy East Texas refinery town with a volatile, defiantly loving family. She recalls her painter mother, seven times married, whose outlaw spirit could tip into psychosis; a fist-swinging father who spun tales with his cronies--dubbed the Liars' Club; and a neighborhood rape when she was eight. An inheritance was squandered, endless bottles emptied, and guns leveled at the deserving and undeserving. With a raw authenticity stripped of self-pity and a poet's eye for the lyrical detail, Karr shows us a "terrific family of liars and drunks ... redeemed by a slow unearthing of truth."When it was published in 1995, Mary Karr?s The Liars? Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, as well as bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karr?s comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious as any of J. D. Salinger?s?a hard-drinking daddy, a sister who can talk down the sheriff at twelve, and an oft-married mother whose accumulated secrets threaten to destroy them all. Now with a new introduction that discusses her memoir?s impact on her family, this unsentimental and profoundly moving account of an apocalyptic childhood is as ?funny, lively, and un-put-downable? (USA Today) today as it ever was.
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